The main objectives of the curricular unit are: (I) to provide the students with the skills required to identify and exercise the correct use of the different senses of the designation "Romanticism" (above all in opposition to the designation "Classicism"), as well as to correlate those senses with the historical and cultural manifestations of the "romantic spirit"; (II) to provide the students with the skills required to identify and describe the conception of literature (the Neoclassical one) the Romanticists reacted against; (III) to provide the students with the skills required to identify and describe the poetry of the so-called "pre-romantic poets"; (IV) to provide the students with the skills required to identify, characterize, and describe the collective and individual traits of the more significant works of the English romantic poets, as well as to correlate those works with their cultural context and the literary manifestos which most caused them to be produced.
The syllabus has been divided into 3 modules. Mod. (1) divides itself into 3 topics: (i) "Romanticism" and "Classicism" as operative concepts; (ii) the "romanticism" of medieval Christianity and Romanticism as a literary, aesthetic, and philosophical movement; (iii) the latter as an attempt to revalidate the otherworldliness of the Medieval Period and a refusal to endorse the immanentism of the pre-romantic stages of Modernity. Mod. (2) divides itself into 2 topics: (i) Pope's "Essay on Criticism" and Neoclassical poetics; (ii) the major trends of English preromantic poetry. Mod. (3) divides itself into 5 topics: (i) "Lyrical Ballads" and "The Defence of Poetry" as literary manifestos; (ii) the persistence of the medieval-Christian sensibility in the major poems of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats; (iii) Coleridge's poetry and the romantic conception of imaginative representation; (iv) "Prometheus Unbound" and romantic freedom; (v) Byron's "Cain" and Christianity.
Teaching methodologies (including assessment): Topics (i), (ii), and (iii) of module (1) are taught by means of the transmission of the teacher's own knowledge and of the reading, elucidation, and correlation of selected passages of those critical studies which the teacher has judged to be most adequate to the subjects handled and the curricular unit's objectives. As a result of their strict textuality, the contents of the topics which make up the whole of module (2) and of module (3) are predominantly taught in a different way: by means of the reading and detailed analysis of the more significant and illuminating passages of the literary manifestos and poems they concern, together with the help of integral synopses of those writings (prepared in advance) and of excerpts of the critical studies and commentaries which the teacher has judged to be most adequate to the curricular unit's objectives and the students' interests and academic level.
BYRON, Lord Gordon. "Poetical Works" (Oxford University Press, 1970.)
COLERIDGE, S. T. "Poetical Works" (Oxford University Press, 1980).
KEATS, John. "Poetical Works" (Oxford University Press, 1982).
MARTIN, Roger, trad. "Les Préromantiques Anglais". "Collection Bilingue des Classiques Anglais”, Paris, Aubier, 1977.
PEAKE, Charles, ed. "Poetry of the Landscape and the Night". London, Edward Arnold, 1978.
POPE, Alexander. "Poetical Works".(Oxford University Press, 1983).
SHELLEY, P. B. "A Defence of Poetry"(Ed. H. F. B. Brett-Smith, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1972) e "Poetical Works"(Oxford University Press, 1986).
ABRAMS, M. H. , ed. "English Romantic Poets". 2. ed., London, Oxford University Press, 1975.
ABRAMS, M. H. "The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition". London, Oxford University Press, 1981.
BOWRA, Maurice. "The Romantic Imagination". Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1984.
0105802
6
